By the end of this article, you’ll be better equipped and more motivated to complete regular checkups on your website.

How Often Does Your Website Need an SEO Health Check?

Speaking of regular, just how often do you need to check on your website’s SEO?

When it comes to your dental health, the more often you go to the dentist, the healthier your teeth will be. This, in turn, means that cleanings will be less painful, and you’ll have fewer costly issues to deal with.

The same is true with your SEO health.

The more often you go through your website’s SEO profile, the easier this process will be. Your website will stay healthier, and you’ll be able to catch and fix issues while they’re still small, before they turn into something much larger and harder to fix.

A good interval for regular SEO health checks would be at least every 6 months. For larger, high-traffic websites, you’ll probably want to do a health check even more often.

So, let’s dive in to this painless four-step process to make your SEO health checkups easier than ever!

The Essential SEO Health Check: 4 Steps for a Quick and Painless Checkup

Step #1: Check for Signs of Negative SEO

Negative SEO is like a cavity. Identifying the problem early and getting ahead of it will save you a lot of pain in the future.

Just head to the Your Links tab to see a complete list of every backlink pointing to your site.

You’ll see that some links are flagged with a warning symbol in the first column, which means they show signs of spam.

If you click on the warning sign, you’ll see more information about why each link has been flagged.

Once you’ve inspected all these flagged links more closely, I’d recommend marking it as either Good or Bad.

If you mark it as Bad, you’ll see a red tag “Bad” under the referring site’s URL, like this:

You can unmark backlinks easily as well, by selecting the backlink, clicking on the “Mark” button and selecting “Remove current marking.”

Once you’ve gone through all the flagged links in your backlink profile and identified the spammy ones, it’s time to do something about them.

Disavow Backlinks

Monitor Backlinks has a super-easy-to-use disavow feature, which allows you to quickly rid your website of spammy backlinks that could be contributing to negative SEO.

Just go back to all the spam links that you marked as Bad in the previous step. These should be disavowed so that Google doesn’t consider them when crawling your site, preventing you from any penalties.

Then, just submit it to Google’s Disavow Tool in order to get those backlinks removed and keep your website penalty-free!

At this point you should also check to make sure that any previous disavows are still in effect. The bad guys who are serious about negative SEO can also delete your disavow file, so it’s important to check every once in a while to make sure it’s still there.

Report Duplicate Content

Another way to stop negative SEO in its tracks is to check for and report duplicate content. Imposters can set up websites which use your exact content, bringing your SEO down.

You can use Copyscape to quickly and easily check for any duplicate content across the web for free. If duplicate content is a serious problem for you, you might want to consider signing up for the paid version which also alerts you when it finds new copies of your content.

Over time, the popularity of certain keywords changes, which means your posts might be better off optimizing for a different, related keyword instead. Research related keywords to find that low-hanging fruit to improve your ranking.

The Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress is a great tool to help you stay on top of this. It allows you to check all these on-page signals for each page as you write, and calls attention to any issues you need to fix.

Step #3: Check Your Backlink Profile

We’ve already talked about disavowing spam backlinks to protect against negative SEO. Now, it’s time to dive in to your whole backlink profile to find out what’s working and what’s not with your link building efforts.

Analyze Your Best Backlinks

It’s a good idea to periodically check on the backlinks that are most important to you: those with high authority and with .edu or .gov extensions, especially if they’re dofollow.

During your SEO health check, revisit those links to make sure they’re still coming in, and analyze any links that you’ve recently lost to see if you can get them back.

With the Your Links section in Monitor Backlinks, you can filter your link profile to focus on those with the best metrics.

When it comes to your external links, you’ll want to make sure that the content you’re linking to is still relevant and up to date. Are there newer, better pages that could replace some of your current external links?

All these simple checks will help you develop an even more powerful backlink profile.

Search for Broken Links

This is also a good time to check for any broken external links. This can happen without you knowing, when a page that you were linking to gets removed.

Start by typing in your domain, and checking the box underneath that says “Check the HTTP Status of all the links found in the website.”

Then, watch the resulting list for any 404 codes.

When you find these broken links, replace them as quickly as possible with other relevant links.

Step #4: Check the Technical Stuff

As the final step in your painless SEO health check, you’ll want to go through the important technical bits and ensure that everything is the way it should be.

This will make your website technically healthy, which will make Google happy!

Update Your Site Security

Google has recently been paying more attention to site security, as shown by the July 2018 update to their Chrome browser. Now, Chrome displays a warning that a website is “not secure” if it doesn’t use HTTPS.

While this isn’t an algorithm update, it is a clear sign of how Google feels about site security. Making your website secure is important for everyone, but it’s especially important if you run a website where people need to input payment information.

If your site is not secure, this could lead to less traffic and fewer sales.

By checking your robots.txt file with this tool, you’ll see if there are any errors, as well as suggestions for improvement.

Do a Speed Test

Site speed has always been an essential part of a good website, because it’s an essential part of UX. That means Google will consider your site speed when ranking your pages.

On your Monitor Backlinks dashboard, you’ll see a quick overview of your site performance right at the top, including your PageSpeed score:

Hover over the icon for more information, or click on it to see your full report from Google Webmasters PageSpeed Insights.

If you click through, the PageSpeed Insights tool will tell you how fast your website loads on both mobile and desktop, as well as giving you suggestions for optimizing your site speed on both.

Check for 302 Redirects

When you must have redirects on your pages, it’s always better to have 301 redirects. This allows any link juice to flow better than with a 302 redirect.

To check your page status, go back to Monitor Backlinks’ free HTTP Header Status Checker, and this time look for any pages that return a 302. These should be changed to a 301 redirect for the best SERP results.

Perform a Mobile-Friendly Test

Since Google’s 2015 mobile update, they’ve become much stricter about the need for mobile-friendly websites. If your website doesn’t perform on mobile as well as it does on desktop, your rankings are going to suffer for it.

To make sure your website is in the clear, use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to check whether or not your website is compatible with mobile devices.